What can bats do for humans? They can teach them how to navigate without using their sight. Scientists found a way to help blind people improve their mobility by using echolocation.
Blind and sighted participants in a 10-week training program were able to learn how to perform echolocation, according to new research by scientists in the UK.
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Bats navigate their environment using echolocation. They produce sound waves that are above the human hearing to catch their prey, according to the National Park Service. These sound waves are called ultrasound that bounces off objects in the environment.
Then the sound returns to the bats ears which are now finely tuned to recognize their own calls. Scientists can translate these sounds into forms that human ears could hear and see.
But recently, a new study from the researchers of Tel Aviv University in Israel discovered that bats, unlike birds and other animals, are born with the knowledge of echolocation. On the other hand, other animals learn echolocation as they grow.
Researchers say it could help keep buildings intruder-proof without the need for traditional CCTV. 29 April, 2021 23:01
Scientists have created a tool to equip objects like smartphones and laptops with a bat-like sense of their surroundings.
A machine-learning algorithm developed by experts at the University of Glasgow can measure echoes and sounds to generate images and create the shape, size and layout of the immediate environment.
Researchers say it could help keep buildings intruder-proof without the need for traditional CCTV, track the movements of vulnerable patients in nursing homes, and even track the rise and fall of a patient’s chest to alert health staff to changes in breathing.
CAMILO LOPEZ-AGUIRRE & LAURA A. B. WILSON, THE CONVERSATION
7 MARCH 2021
Scientists have found another piece in the puzzle of how echolocation evolved in bats, moving closer to solving a decades-long evolutionary mystery.
All bats - apart from the fruit bats of the family Pteropodidae (also called flying foxes) - can echolocate by using high-pitched sounds to navigate at night.
Current Biology, has shown how the capability for sophisticated echolocation not only evolved multiple times in groups of bats, but also that it
never evolved in fruit bats.
The remarkable sounds of bats
To navigate using echolocation, bats produce high-frequency calls in their larynx (voice box) and emit these through their nose or mouth. These calls, usually made at higher frequencies than humans can hear, echo off objects and bounce back.